The TriZetto Group announced Monday a new performance lab in which the company is using IBM hardware to test the scalability of its software applications for payers. The testing will determine how many members each system can support without compromising performance.
TriZetto's core enterprise platforms automate and streamline member enrollment, premium billing, claims adjudication, customer service and other administrative tasks. Its care management systems support case, disease and utilization management functions.
"Our applications serve all types and sizes of health plans," said Bruce Kaurene, TriZetto's vice president and chief technologist. "Our systems must be able to scale up to efficiently process the high volume of transactions of the largest payer organizations, with predictability and low risk, and scale down to enable the most cost-effective streamlining and automation of administrative functions for local and regional healthcare payers. This lab will demonstrate that TriZetto's solutions can rise to the challenge."
"While TriZetto has long tested its applications in lab settings, we embarked on a journey to establish a permanent performance, scalability and benchmarking lab to perform predictive modeling, drive higher quality and deliver higher value," said David MacLeod, TriZetto Services CTO. "This lab provides a near real-world environment in which to test and evaluate combinations of TriZetto and third-party partner products, both technology-based and manual procedures, to identify and confirm enhancements that provide operational acuity and efficiencies. In partnership with IBM and others, TriZetto will demonstrate the scalability of products and technologies that support large and small health plans, including those with growing, multimillion member counts."
Located in TriZetto's data center in downtown Albuquerque, the company's performance lab is billed as the nation's only such dedicated facility that benchmarks the scalability of a software vendor's systems for healthcare payer organizations.
Sitting atop a raised white floor beneath a fire-retardant ceiling, the equipment includes an IBM DS8000 series-class storage system, IBM Power 780 AIX server, set of 10 IBM System x3850 X5 Intel servers and N-Series Network-Attached Storage system. In this high-security data center, a combined team of TriZetto engineers and remote IBM technicians fine-tune the software and hardware technology as they conduct simulations of the benefits and care administration tasks performed by health plans.
"TriZetto is a valued and long-time partner of IBM," said Kathy Bennett, a vice president of IBM Systems and Technology Group, ISV Technical Enablement. "We're confident that testing will support that TriZetto systems scale to varying membership levels, without performance degradation, running on IBM hardware. We believe that work in the performance lab over the coming months will prove that a payer's investment in TriZetto and IBM can yield optimal performance with minimal hardware and maintenance. We are committed to working with TriZetto to scale solutions that help optimize workload performance with potentially lower total cost of ownership for our mutual payer customers."